One Last Shot: Chapter 4

I glance at the text again as the driver turns up Park Avenue to travel north toward Sasha’s Fifth Avenue penthouse.

So presumptuous.

Yet here I am, because I have a million questions and there’s only one person who can give me the answers. And because, if there really is a marriage contract, I have to figure out how to get out of it.

I sit back against the supple leather in the back seat of his luxurious Jaguar with a heavy sigh. The driver’s eyes immediately track to the rearview mirror, but I glance out the window because I have no desire for him to see me flustered or to report my current state back to his boss.

I switch over to the web browser on my phone, where I have about fifteen different tabs open—all of them a result of my numerous Google searches for Alex Ivanov. He already told me he has been playing hockey in New York for eight years, which—now that I’ve had time to process it—means that the entire time I was living here, he was here too. What he hadn’t mentioned was how damn good he is.

As I’d read article after article about him, I couldn’t help but feel so unbelievably proud of him. He’d done it. He’d accomplished everything I’d watched him work so hard for as a teenager. All those years of before sunrise practices, traveling constantly for hockey tournaments, giving up college to go pro in Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League. He ended up exactly where he always said he would—dominating the NHL.

Why didn’t I know?

I close my eyes and take a deep breath, trying hard not to think about the night he left me for the last time. I’ve had plenty of loss in my life, but there was nothing I could do about the car crash that stole Mama and Viktor from me when I was thirteen. There was nothing I could do about Papa dying when I was in my early twenties. But Sasha leaving, that was personal. A big, huge F You to our friendship, to the space I held for him inside my heart. I lost my best friend that night, and in a way, I lost a piece of myself too.

I didn’t know because I couldn’t handle knowing—I made sure I never found out. I never looked him up, never asked about him. I avoided hockey like the plague. The only way I got through it was by pretending like there was no Aleksandr Ivanov out in this world.

“We’re here, miss,” the driver says. Those dozens of city blocks went much faster than I was prepared for, and I’m feeling emotionally off-kilter—unbalanced—as I reach for the door. “The doorman is expecting you. He’ll show you the way.”

“Thank you.”

The car door is opened for me. “Ms. Volkova, I’m Martin. I’ll show you to Mr. Ivanov’s floor.”

The man dressed in a green-and-black livery who extends his hand to me has friendly eyes with enough wrinkles around the edges to know he’s spent a lifetime smiling. His white hair is closely cut, and the way his white mustache moves when he talks is an amusement to behold. I like him instantly, and I’m an exceptionally good judge of character.

I follow Martin through a double set of glass doors and up a few time-worn marble steps to a posh lobby in a prewar building that reeks of old money. Enormous slabs of marble tile and deeply pigmented Oriental rugs line the floors, the walls are all gleaming white stone, and several gold and crystal chandeliers drip from the high arched ceilings. I’ve been in plenty of posh New York residential buildings, but there’s something extra special about this one.

Martin leads me past the concierge’s desk and pushes the call button in front of the second elevator on the right side. Around us, gilded mirrors veined with age glow from the light of the lobby like mercury glass. “This elevator will open into the entryway of his apartment. He’ll meet you there.”

The thought of being alone with Aleksandr sends my stomach plummeting and my intestines threatening to give out. I have ended up with my mother’s nervous stomach, which she’d always threatened when I teased her about it as a kid. It’s not the part of her I would have wished to keep, but at least I have her smile too.

The elevator doors open and Martin uses his arm to hold them for me while I step in. He then reaches his arm in, sticks a plastic key card into a slot in the bank of buttons, presses the button for the sixteenth floor, and sends me on my way with a small nod and a salute.

I swallow down my nerves and my fear, instead putting on the air of indifference that I’ll need in order to deal with my ex-best friend, the man who is now a perfect stranger I’m allegedly married to.

When the elevator comes to a stop, the doors open into a grand entryway. The floors are a warm wood laid in a herringbone pattern, the walls are white-on-white with ornate baseboards and thick art deco crown molding that tops every wall. Framed art hangs in regular intervals around the room, and the curved glass ceiling with thin black steel framing the large pieces of glass sits like a crown above the space. In the center of the room, in jeans and a sweatshirt and bare feet, stands Sasha. In his casual state surrounded by the elegant space, he looks so much like the teenager I once loved that it squeezes my heart painfully.

“Hello, Aleksandr,” I say as I step from the elevator. He winces slightly at my use of his given name rather than his childhood nickname.

He stares without saying anything, those intense gray eyes raking over me until I’m shifting uncomfortably. Ordinarily, I’d make a crack about him not being able to take his eyes off me, because I’ve always found that keeping things light and flirtatious is the best way to maintain the upper hand in any given situation. But not with him. We have to deal with legal issues together—there’s nothing to be won by flirting with him.

He shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it. “I can’t believe you’re here, in my apartment.”

I almost scoff at the term “apartment” and the way people on the Upper East Side throw that word around when they’re talking about twenty million dollar co-ops.

“You invited me.”

“I didn’t think you’d come,” he says, and I’m struck by the wonder in his voice.

“I need answers, and you didn’t exactly give me another choice.”

“You always do what you’re told?” He runs a hand through his hair and looks away, so it’s hard to know if he’s legitimately asking or if the question is meant flirtatiously.

“Actually, I usually give the orders.” I eye the living room through the eight-foot doorway to his right and the dining room I can see behind him. “Are you going to invite me in, or should we have this conversation standing in your entryway?”

“Sorry,” he mutters, gesturing toward the living room with its pristine carved wood walls. He walks into the room and heads toward an open door on the far side. I follow him into a much smaller sitting area, a room dominated by floor-to-ceiling glass doors along two walls and a fire burning in the fireplace along a third wall.

It’s hard not to gush about the city lights on the other side of all that glass. Instead, I silently walk over, observing the twenty-foot wide terrace with views of Central Park beyond the trees that line Fifth Avenue, and the Upper West Side lit up on the opposite side of all that green space. It’s like having a view of the NYC skyline from within New York.

“The view is even better during the day,” he says from behind me. He’s close enough that his breath tickles the side of my neck and a shiver runs through me.

“I’ll take your word for it,” I say, turning with my arms crossed under my chest. I stumble for a second over my next words because I’m not prepared for how much space he takes up, how he seems to tower over me even though in these heels I’m at least six feet tall. “That was a huge bomb you dropped on me in your lawyer’s office today.”

“I shouldn’t have surprised you like I did.” Aleksandr turns and sits on a large sling-style chair with a gunmetal frame and thick tobacco-colored leather cushions, and gestures to the long ivory couch next to it.

Instead, I take the chair that matches his on the far side of the coffee table. This seat gives me the perfect view of him. I can watch his face for the telltale signs I know—his left eye twitching when he lies, his lips turning down at the corners when he doesn’t like what he’s hearing—without having to be too close to him. Over here, I feel like I can breathe.

“Tell me how this happened,” I say.

He sighs and runs his hand through that thick black hair again. “I already told you. What we thought was a contract about my dad loaning yours money was actually a marriage contract.”

It’s hard not to be embarrassed, even all these years later, that my dad couldn’t afford the training I needed to make the Austrian ski team, and that Sasha’s dad “lent” it to him even though there was no way he could repay it. I’d promised myself then that I would pay him back myself. After years of skiing followed by a couple years modeling, I’d saved enough.

“I saw your dad years ago,” I tell Sasha. “I tried to pay him back, only to be told that the debt had already been repaid. I have no idea how my father could have managed to pay him back, and your father wouldn’t share any details, only insisting that I owed him nothing.” That money became the seed money to eventually start my own event planning company, and so in a way I feel like I owe Mr. Ivanov for my financial independence too. “He didn’t mention being my father-in-law.”

“Like he would.” Sasha rolls his eyes as he sinks further into his chair.

“And you really didn’t know a thing about this until your father passed away?”

The eye twitches when he says no, just like it did in his lawyer’s office when he told me he had the same questions I did about our father’s intent.

“I know all your tells, Aleksandr. Which means I know you’re lying to me. What aren’t you telling me?”

“I’ve told you everything I know,” he says, and this time his eye doesn’t twitch. Well, what the hell does that mean? I don’t know what to believe.

I pick at a piece of nonexistent lint on my black wide-leg trousers just to have something to do, some way to channel all the energy that’s ricocheting around inside me. Finally, I look across the table at him. “Why would they marry us off to each other and not tell us? It makes no sense at all. And what if one of us had wanted to get married in the meantime?”

“That’s never even been close to being an issue,” he says. “Has it for you?”

“No, but that’s beside the point. My father’s been gone for six years. What if in that time I had wanted to marry someone else? Was anyone going to tell me I was already married?”

“I don’t know the answer to that, either,” he says.

I jump to my feet, too frustrated to keep still, and use the space behind my chair to pace along the wall of glass doors. The view from behind the chair looks directly across Central Park to the Upper West Side, but from this angle I’m looking north, toward the heavily wooded area. The buildings beyond the trees emit a glow that emanates above the North Woods.

The chunky heels of my black open-toed booties click noisily across the brick tiles as I pace. I have a sinking suspicion that he knows why our fathers agreed to this marriage and he isn’t telling me. With both of them in their graves, he is my only hope of discovering the truth. The frustration is evident in my voice when I say, “I came here for answers. If you aren’t going to give me any, why am I here?”

He stands and makes his way toward a low cabinet I didn’t even notice on our way in. “Here, let me get you a drink.”

“Don’t you dare open a bottle!” It is a Russian custom that once you pour from a bottle of alcohol, you finish the entire thing. It’s bad luck not to. And I’m not sitting around drinking an entire bottle of vodka with him tonight. I have too much to accomplish tomorrow, and I already lost too much time today looking into marriage laws in Austria and citizenship laws in the US.

He turns toward me, a flash of annoyance in his eyes. It is very bad form to turn down something your host offers you, and we both know it. I’m being both rude and petulant, but I couldn’t care less if I offend him at this moment.

“You are impossible, as always!” His voice, which is usually so level and controlled, is a loud growl. I find that I like that as much as I did when I was a teenager. I lived to rattle him, to see that carefully crafted layer of self-control begin to crack.

“Why are you guys yelling?” a small voice asks.

Both our heads spin toward the open doorway, where a little girl with an angelic face and dark brown hair in two braids stands in her light pink pajamas.

What the actual hell is happening right now?

Aleksandr is at her feet in half a second, kneeling in front of her so they are face-to-face. “Remember how we talked about you going to bed early tonight?” he asks. His voice is soothing, not reprimanding like I’d have expected.

He has a freaking daughter?

“But I heard yelling,” she says.

“Sorry, we didn’t mean to be so loud.”

“But, Dyadya,” the little girl—his niece, I assume, since she just called him Uncle—says. Then she looks at me, lowers her voice, and says to him, “She’s even more beautiful than you said.”

The air is sucked from my lungs—maybe from the whole room, based on how I can’t seem to catch a breath. Aleksandr told his niece I was beautiful?

He glances over his shoulder at me for a fraction of a second, then back to his niece. “Okay, time to get you back to bed.”

“I want Petra to put me to bed.” She looks directly at me. How does she know my name? They’ve obviously talked about me, but why? Does she know we’re married, too?

“How about I just put you to bed, Stella?” he says, standing.

“I’ll do it.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. I don’t even know what makes me offer. But I need a moment away from him to collect my thoughts, and maybe a conversation with Stella will help me figure out what’s going on here. She seems more likely to tell me the truth than Aleksandr.

She bounces on the balls of her feet, a beautiful and victorious smile spreading across her lips. Before Aleksandr can express any objection, she rushes over to me and takes my hand in her little one, pulling me toward the door.

I’m led back through the living room to the entryway, then down a long hallway. Her room is the first one on the left, and when we enter and I see the big windows out to the terrace, I realize that her bedroom probably shares a wall with the sitting room we were in.

She climbs in her bed, then pulls the covers up and pats the space next to her. I’ve never spent time around a child this age before. Holding my friend Lauren’s twin daughters, who aren’t even one yet, is the only experience I have with children.

I sit on her bed next to her, and she immediately grabs my hand in both of hers, holding it to her chest. “Dyadya said we need you to help us.”

I have no idea what she is talking about. This must be Nikolai’s daughter, but why is she here in Aleksandr’s apartment in a bedroom clearly designed for her? Does she stay with him sometimes? Does this mean Nikolai lives in New York too?

“Tell me how I can help,” I say, because I don’t know what else I can do.

“Dada said maybe you can help him adopt me.”

I give her a small smile, hoping it hides the way my entire body is reacting to these two pieces of information—the fact that she is using Dyadya, which means uncle in Russian, interchangeably with Dada, and the fact that he is trying to adopt her, which means something has happened to Nikolai. My heart breaks for her in this moment, so young and apparently orphaned.

This also means Aleksandr is being even less honest with me than I initially thought and he’s somehow put Niko’s daughter in the middle of this, which infuriates me.

I give her little hands, which fit perfectly in my palm, a squeeze. “I need to talk to your uncle about all this.”

She sits up quickly and wraps her hands around my waist and presses her head into my chest as she squeezes me into a hug. “Thank you!”

I don’t know what to do, so I pat her back in response. When she lies back down I tell her, “Okay, time for bed, for real. Should I turn out this light?” I nod toward the pink lamp on the dresser next to her bed.

“Yes. I have a special nightlight that keeps all the bad dreams away, so I don’t need the light on anymore.”

A knife twists in my stomach. What has happened to her that’s causing bad dreams? What happened to her parents?

I turn off the light and brush my palm across her forehead as I whisper goodnight. When I shut her bedroom door behind me, I stand in the hallways with my back to the wall and rest my head against it as I stare up at the high ceiling.

What have I gotten myself into?

There’s movement in the corner of my eye, and I turn my head to see Sasha standing in the entryway. His face is anguished, like the pain is seeping out through cracks in his tough exterior. I’ve seen this look once before, when Mama and Viktor were in a fatal car accident. The day he climbed up into my treehouse to comfort me through his own pain. We’d cried together that night, and it was the beginning of the three years where he was my best friend.

It’s easier than I would have imagined to put the anger and resentment aside in the face of his unimaginable loss. I don’t know exactly what he’s been through, but I can see in his eyes that he needs me like I once needed him.

My steps are quick and sure as I rush down the hall to him. I wrap him in my arms, and though his sharp intake of breath alerts me to his surprise, he wraps his thick arms around me in response. We stand there for a minute until he says, “What did she tell you?” His cheek moves against the top of my head as his words drift down my hair.

“She said I need to help you adopt her.”

The sound that leaves his mouth is half sigh, half groan. “I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t really need you.”

That stings a bit. I wish he’d come to me as a friend, not out of desperation because I was his last resort “You going to be honest with me now?” I ask, without letting go.

“I was always going to be honest with you. I was just going to get a couple drinks in you to take the edge off first.”

I laugh into that space between his neck and his shoulder, and for a second I think maybe things will be okay.